Oxford Instruments Plc’s shares jumped 42 pence to 294 pence after the company announced that it has satisfied IBM that its X-ray lithography electron storage ring is sufficient, to be shipped to its integrated chip facility in New York: although the synchrotron is not yet at full specification, shipments will start from the Oxfordbased company in the fourth quarter of this year; no information was given about when the device will actually be ready for use in chip fabrication; Oxford has been testing the ring for two months and it has now succeeded in storing an electron beam of over 50mA with a lifetime of one hour at the full electron beam energy of 700 MeV; electron rings can be used as an X-ray source to etch denser circuitry and greater mass memory chips, than the conventional ultra violet light lithographic process but existing generators to produce the required intensity of X-ray source are too large for commercial uses; Oxford says that Helios can be installed in a silicon wafer factory and that it would be suitable for fabricating 64M-bit and 256M-bit memories.
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